My friend Sanjay decided to have a little fun this past week with “Click” and “Clack”, the brothers who host that wonderful radio show Car Talk (that we’ve ALL listened to at least once on a weekend morning). I should clarify that although his question was funny, he wasn’t entirely joking. Thus, it is a legitimate question, the response to which might be quite informative and useful for some of our Hindu readers who also love their cars. Here is Sanjay’s question:
Hey guys,
I have a macabre question. I’m both Hindu and a car enthusiast. Hindus customarily get cremated when we die. I’m putting together my will and would like to require my ashes to be deposited into the gas tank of my favorite car. Then, I want the car driven down my favorite river road in California. This is how I want my ashes poetically spread. My question is: Will this also poetically destroy the car? If so, I need to make sure the car is then driven directly to a Pick-N-Pull.
Thanks guys,
Sanjay Shah
Venice, CA… [Link]
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You can listen to the Tappet Brother’s on-air advice here. Hurry though because the link will only work until the next episode airs. After that you’ll have to download it as a podcast.
Mwaaaaaha! Priceless. I’m weepin’ heah.
I miss Click and Clack. I used to listen to them all the time. Even their laughter makes me laugh.
“The ironing board in that house is the place where my tonsils were removed.”
Mwaaaaaha!
“It’s a few and few. A few hundred to take it out, another few if you want it put back together.”
I’m convulsing with laughter. God, I need to get back to listening to these guys. Hope everyone listens to all 8 minutes of the link. Well done, Abhi; well done, Sanjay.
somebody rush a freaking transcript!
OMG I love these guys. I don’t miss a single show and missed this one apparently. I’m dying here. Wow. A year or so ago this desi guy called and asked whether he should get a new car since he is bringing his new wife from India and his car runs great but looks like shit and those guys were so hysterical I had to pull over and laugh.
now that art is no longer about the sublime, cars fill the void. the dude across the street from me has a ferrari daytona, testarossa, porsche turbo (’77), and aston martin vanquish.
i was walking past his garage the other day and he was cleaning the vanquish…with a featherduster.
What a dilettante. Feather dusters are so ’87…I dust mine with that lovely-jubley, uber-fluffy swiffer. 😉
Nice oakland booty, u can be my fluffer anytime.
btw, i’ve also seen the ferrari enzo in the flesh, which is like seeing god. it was owned by the guy who made the 1-off ferrari p4/5, which i’d say is also like seeing god, except its much rarer.
cars like horses will become obsolete.
You must be super rich. Sports cars are cool, but I don’t see the point in owning more than one at a time..
The more you own, the less time you spend with each one and the more you spread your love..
Although if he was a collector and planning on selling his collection it would make sense to own more than one..
Sadaiyappan:
i guess it’s like collecting art. each work has its own beauty. and supercars, like wine, have their own character. the 911 rear weight bias has its own feel,leading to enourmous accleration due to the traction, not to mention the overstear. mid-engine ferraris are highly tuned and twitchy like race cars. the modern astons are just sublime grand tourers.
. Pheew! Is he rich or is he compensating? (I’m not a guy so those are the only two reasons I can figure for wanting all of above).
compensators and poseurs usually go for latter day exotics which are flashy. the daytona, for example, is like from ’73, utterly beautiful but really understated, as it is front engined and not one of those low, wide, mid-engined, look-at-me chick magnets.
its also hard to drive, no driver aids like abs or traction control or ever power steering. at low speeds its like a truck and u need muscle to steer it. at higher speed it loosens up and you can really feel the road. in other words, its for the true connoisseurs.
Manju, are you perchance, living in Miami?
Last year, they a guy called Vivek called. They went on about his name sounding like that of a Czech secret agent. It was very funny.
Manju, are you perchance, living in Miami?
actually manhattan. and it’s a 1 car garage. (he’s got another garage in the suburbs).
“A year or so ago this desi guy called and asked whether he should get a new car since he is bringing his new wife from India and his car runs great but looks like shit and those guys were so hysterical I had to pull over and laugh.”
JOAT, I remember that show too and even remember the guy’s name — Prashant. I wanted to bring him back on “Stump the Chumps” and see what he decided to do! Love Click and Clack and Dewey Cheatem and Howe in Haavahd Square in…”our fair city.”
This was great–Saturday mornings with aloo paratha, sweet lime pickle and the Car Talk Boys. Nothing could be better 🙂
I heard this last Saturday morning and it was hilarious. Those guys are awesome… and they make fun of almost every caller’s name!
One thing disturbs me: This was a legitimate question????!!! Yikes. Hope Sanjay thinks of a better method than ending up clogging up a fuel filter….
Holy horsefeathers!!! I heard this live but the most important question was left unanswered- what is Sanjay’s favorite car?!? Ok, three guesses, Abhimeister, tell me hot or cold.
67/68 Mustang (or any 4th or 5th gen Mustang)
Subaru Impreza WRX STI
or
i hope its #2. american muscle cars really annoy me. sure, there’s a lot of bang for the buck. but they are straight line dragsters w/o no feel and they can’t go around a corner. and the interiors suck.
real sports cars are compact and small,light, and high-reving engines. but fat americans can’t ride in them. even the compact ones, like the viper, are weighed down with huge 8liter engines while the porsche goes with 3.5.
This morning’s credits included this:
Accountant from our Bombay office , Vishnu Payup
I’ll have him leave a comment. Check back later this week.
Vitek is actually a fairly common Czech name.
LOVE these guys WAH HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
My favorite car is a 1970 Plymouth Road Runner. The manufacturer got permission from Warner Brothers to have the horn Meep Meep!
You have excellent taste in cars, my friend, though the ’68 Dodge Charger and ’69 Charger Daytona are my favorites from that long-gone era.
Vitek is actually a fairly common Czech name.
Could be. But his name was Vivek. He was made to spell it. 🙂
DJ, you are dirty! I love classic muscle cars, esp. the ones made by Dodge. I had a ’73 Dodge Dart Swinger. It was fast, green and bulletproof. sniff How I miss the old gas-guzzler.
Right. And theirs is a humor show where the humor often comes from the ingenious morphing of names – e.g. Vishnu Payup (wishin’ you pay up). This one took only a single letter substitution to make credible. They’re geniuses at their art form, and they even know something about cars, to top it off.
What do you expect from a couple of MIT grads?
Muscle cars aren’t cars. They’re boats with wheels, except the steering is less precise. I swear to God, the one time I’d welcome some anti-Americanism here on SM, I can’t get any.
Then allow me to rejoinder, since the topic of cars comes up so frequently on SM:
There are several cars that are/were made in America that are not boats. There’s the Ford GT (and the old GT40, which are totally drool-worthy even today), the AC Cobra, and of course the latest generation of Corvette. They do use larger displacement engines (with the ‘Vette C6 (and the C6-R!) and the Cobra, they’ve taken simplicity to an artform with the internals), but they did it right.
I appreciate the high-revving Ferrarris and I do love me the Porsche GT/4. But I also love a car with muscle down low and in the middle, where you can use it. Give me torque over horsepower on the street any day. My own dream car is the aforementioned AC Cobra. It’s got nothing in it except engine, brakes, steering wheel, and did I mention more engine? It goes like a two-year-old 30 seconds after you put him in a car seat.
Refined? No.
Exhilarating to drive? God yes.
technically, the AC cobra is a british sports car, though it uses a big ford v-8. i once drove a purple replica. scary.
Nice! I think the model peaked with the Hurst Hemi Dart in ’68, but the Swinger isn’t a car I would mind driving. Did yours come billboard stripes?
You speak the gospel, my brother. The Shelby Daytona Coupe is nothing short of a monster and influenced heavily my personal favorite of all the muscle cars, the Viper GTS (1996-2002). It may not be for everyone, but if you equate a high performance vehicle with driving gloves and electric seat warmers, I definitely don’t expect you to understand.
i love the viper’s volumptuous styling, and it is quite compact with proper proportions. the price is right too. but its basicly at truck engine in a plastic body…too big an engine and too weak a chassis. i’ve never drove one but european review always mention the twitchy handling.
the american lack of attention to detail shows in the interior; while a mere mini, vw bug, audi tt look well thought out w/o being expensive. i’m not asking for an interior of a pagani zonda here, just something well put together. but they did produce the car from concept in like 12 months or something.
Brothers! I can hear you lot talking about cars from all the way over yonder!
I use to harbor the same sentiments as Manju but, thankfully, not any longer. America ain’t refined but raw and the sixties was American engineering at its most raw and I learned this in a bizarre way. I spent one year of high school in an all boys school where it was all about Chargers, Stangs, Firebirds, T-birds, Camaro’s and I hated all of those cars then (well, I still hate Camaro’s). I hated them because the engineering couldn’t touch corner-hugging European engineering and certainly couldn’t hold a candle to European design flair. And that hatred lingered until one day I reflected back on my high school years. There were more than a few country boys in that high school but one in particular stood out. He was 6’4″, made of muscle, wore butt-hugger Wranglers, cowboy boots, drove a Charger, chew Skoal’s, and had a mean, rock-solid jaw that had been shaped by many fists. Everday in my geometry class he would eat a raw potato. He walked in late every single day, potato in one hand, empty water bottle in the other which, by the end of class, was full of Skoal’s and spit. He first ate the potato, probably as breakfast, then lined his gums with some Skoal’s. Many moons later, I was in college and I lived with Ford freaks, foreign car freaks, Le Mans freaks, F1 freaks, WRC freaks, and superbike freaks so I was privy to a lot of great conversations and arguments, American vs European vs Japanese was the usual undertone, and shrugging ones shoulders to another guy’s ‘personal taste’ was how disputes were settled. Until I remembered the potato-eating cowboy. See, some foods are great raw, some are great cooked. American muscle is raw, European is cooked, Japenese is, I dunno, takeaway. Eating a potato raw is not refined, even if you ate it in a bistro. But if you ate a raw potato while driving Route 66 in New Mexico, it might be great. I’m not a muscle car guy myself but I have come to appreciate American muscle and the context which makes American muscle so appealing, namely the backdrop- open, straight roads to nowhere, the art of cruising, drag racing, and cars that reflect the boys who drove them, the quintessential American bad ass. In short, I don’t eat raw potatoes, but I can appreciate people who eat raw potatoes.
NUFF SAID.
Some of dis writing here is poetry;)
Ode to american muscle…sniff
If it had, it would have looked mean…no, mine was more bad-ass-granny looking. And as for this guy:
Sounds like family, except my uncles used a Brim coffee can for a spitoon. No Von Mises thanks for penning such a blistering portrait. Brilliant!
No von Mises, #35 was awesome 🙂
NVM, what 36, 37, and 38 said. Anyways, I gotta go: my geometry class started 10 minutes ago. @=)